Domain: chenbro.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to chenbro.com.
Comments · 6
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the tim taylor way of doing it....I'm currently building this baby up:
1 of these http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=1&modelno=rpc-4220
1 of these http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/raid_controllers/sata_sas/3ware_9750-8i/index.html
1 quad core Xeon + mobo + 8gigs of ram of your choice
1 of these http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=75
1 of operating system of your choice
20 of these http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=733
and then put on the media software of your choice (mine is ps3 media server)
This is all because my current (6tb) array got filled with media, home movies, tv shows and what have you. So, hopefully ~30tb (raid6 + 2 hotspares) will do the trick for a while.....
Probably WAY overkill for your use, but +hypervisor of your choice, its nice and easy to run as a media server and an ARMAII server or TF2 server....
lastly, check out i-star or istar usa, they have rackmount cases for prettymuch everything. Awesomeness! (50drive case....maybe for my next one, mwahaha) -
Re:96TB should do you fine
more specifically.. http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=45
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96TB should do you fine
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Re:FreeNAS
One more thing... Intel has a new 4-drive (SATA2) NAS server which is only $430 on Amazon, and comes with EMC software, or you can put FreeNAS, OpenFiler, or WHS on it.
Model # is SS4200E and SS4200EHWThe EHW doesn't come with the EMC software, and is supposed to be $100 less, but the actual price difference right now is less than $30.
They also have 2 eSATA ports.
Or, you can get a Chenbro NAS case with 4 hot-swap SATAII bays. It's about $230 with the power supply, and holds an Mini-ITX motherboard.
The new Intel Atom boards are really cheap, although the VIA C7's currently use less power.I suspect that if WHS gets more popular, a lot more cases like this will start popping up, hopefully cheaper... $220 is awfully high for a mini-ITX case.
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Building your own
Unless you're really strapped for space, you can save a good chunk of money by going with something other than a 1U chassis. 2U costs less than 1U (generally). 3U costs less than 2U, and 4U is generally way cheaper than 3U. 4U is the sweet spot since it's little more than a mid-tower case turned on its side -- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!
There's other reasons to go with a 4U case. You can use standard PSU's in a 4U case. You can use standard PCI/PCI-X/PCI-E cards in a 4U case (or a 3U in some cases). For 1U or 2U you'll either need low profile cards (2U only) or you'll need a riser card.
Another nice thing about any case bigger than 1U is that you generally don't need any special motherboard. You'll need a special heatsink that blows from the side for a 2U, but 3U and 4U can typically use any old HSF you have laying around.
Now, that being said, I just built four 2U servers for my home rendering studio. This is what I bought:
CASE
Chenbro 2U (PN# 21508B)
This is an excellent server case. It offers eight hot-plug SATA drive slots (SAS is optional). It holds any typical ATX/E-ATX server board. 2U PSU's up to 650W are available.
Motherboard
Tyan Thunder S3992-E dual Socket-1207
I've got four of these, each with two Opteron 2220 CPU's and 8GB of RAM. One of them has an Areca SATA RAID controller running eight 1TB drives as my primary file server. These come with dual Gigabit Ethernet links and a single 10/100 link.
Good luck! -
Re:Build one instead?
I built a 2Tb storage device w/another 250Gb for the OS a couple years ago as a backup solution for ~30 colo servers. I used a Tyan dual Xeon motherboard (there is a lot of compressing taking place on this machine), A 3Ware hardware RAID card, and a Chenbro 3u rackmount case with 12 SATA hot-swap bays and a single internal bay. I put 13 250Gb drives in it (2x250Gb software mirrored for OS, 10xRAID5 = 2Tb storage and 1 hot spare).
At the time the cost was ~$4000 while commercial solutions were closer to ~$8,000. I used CentOS 3 as the OS (4 was still in beta) and had to use the centosplus unsupported kernel in order to use reiser on the 2Tb array -- ext3 didn't work for some reason that I don't recall. The 3Ware card showed up with stock kernel modules as a SCSI controller.
I assume someone could build a similar system for about the same cost with much more disk space now. Also, if cost is a factor, the hardware RAID card (~$800) could be dropped in favor of software RAID and a single processor mobo could be used. I really** like the Chenbro case though and for the extra cost it leaves a lot of room for expansion if you were to start with only 5 drives and wanted to expand later.